Simbol is now in Beta: Build a Social WebXR site today

After a few months of hard work, Simbol is finally in Beta. We have been using it for some time, specially to power https://simbol.io and it’s now ready to be properly used in the wild.

WebXR is coming really really soon, but making a site that supports it isn’t easy. Existing tools like BabylonJS, Three.JS, A-Frame, Supercraft are making it easier to create a 3D scene that you can then view from a VR headset.

And there are reallyamazingexperiencesoutthere already, but, like anyone who has tried VR can agree, Social VR makes it so much better increasing our sense of presence. A really cool characteristic is that if you know the other person, you can recognise them just by how they move their heads and hands.

With Simbol, you can easily make your GLTF or Three.JS scene a social experience. The core tool is an easy to use JavaScript library. It provides a universal identity system where people own their data, not Simbol, so it’s portable between apps. It also comes with a lightweight locomotion, interaction and physics system. Here’s a quick example of how it works with the virtual world at https://simbol.io:

Though still a Beta, we’re confident that Simbol can provide a lot of value today to your WebXR site. There are still some interesting technical challenges being worked on for the V1 release, mainly performance improvements and critical safetytools. This is an open project and we encourage and support contributions. Also make sure to follow us on Twitter for updates of the next releases towards V1.